tonight we have a special bigger picture discussion on the role money plays in our democracy and what can be done to take the money out of politics and to restore the power and voice of the american people this monday marks the third anniversary of the u.s. supreme court's landmark and highly controversial citizens united decision in the last three years we have seen unprecedented amounts of money flowed our democracy taking power away from the american people and giving it to the highest bidder among the billionaires and transnationals the two thousand and twelve election was the most expensive election ever there was more outside money spent than ever before and much of it came from secretive dark money groups so how can we come together to reclaim the power of the people in the american democracy here to help

us answer this and other issues surrounding democratic processes in our republic is your wood president and c.e.o. of the hip-hop caucus mary boyle vice president of communications at common cause and alexis baden mer. center and got a political director with the organic consumers association and what thank you all for joining me tonight let's start with the money out voters in day of action revenue want to give us a snapshot of this definitely the money out voters in a coalition of groups coming together to really this bring awareness to how the citizens united decision was to many people that decision was as bad as the dred scott decision was. couldn't couldn't you argue that it was actually the mirror image of dred scott because dred scott said that people are property in this one property as people know you can't you kid. decision was so bad i mean that decision

for great scott people so outweighs any lip to that mr spock with the thirteenth the fourteenth and fifteenth amendment the civil war and the civil war. we don't want that to happen but we do want this to be change because this has a huge impact on democracy and all communities so hundreds of organizations have come together. money out voters and that's the web site money out. voters in dot org and they've come together to really continue bring awareness to how bad this decision is and you know very common cause i mean we think this is a really a movement moment this is this is formed around you know the third anniversary of citizens united as you say but also martin luther king's birthday is a day of service in action for people who want to you know really go out and start demanding progress legislative fixes for you know campaign finance issues as well

as an effort to stop and push back a lot of the voter suppression tactics that we have seen lately it's really extraordinary juxtaposition you know the anniversary of citizens united and the birth date of the reverend martin luther king and and and the you know the second inauguration of america's first african-american president it really is alexis where do you see this going what are the early signs well i think the fact that an organization like mine is making this a priority it tells you a little bit about where we are as a movement i represent consumers who are interested in buying organic food wouldn't think that money in politics or corporate personhood would be very important to us but we've gone up against major corporations and electoral fights and we've been creamed through lives that were paid for with millions of dollars forty six million dollars with spent against us and our proposition thirty seven five in california for g.m.o. label if we didn't have a chance even. so nine out of ten people support that cause so when you have

a breakdown of democracy like that then we all need to get involved and it's a great it's a great example of you know how can you have a functioning democracy and how can people make decisions when the the loudest voice is also the richest voice or the i'm saying it badly but it's you know this this hijacking of our democracy. what in this in these last three years how what are the steps that you think that we should be taking i mean there's there's been a variety of proposals a move to amend as proposed you know a member of the constitution there are others who are saying just wait until some of the right wing crackpots on the supreme court decide to retire or pass away you know god forbid i'm not wishing anybody ill but you know thank goodness that we have a democrat the white house right now would have been really scary of romney is in there and then there are people who think that we can legislate around it what are your what what are your thoughts those are great i mean are you name there are

great things that you do to bring awareness in the suites i think what we're doing this weekend and through this entire weekend you could do to bring awareness in the streets and i think that that's the key thing here i think that people need to let the members of congress even the president that they were outraged by the fact that silent eighty three percent of americans republican and democrat don't think this was a good decision just one of those as i say your bipartisan choice most people don't think that this is good for our country they know that what can happen because not as is not as a fact just the post election but down the ballot has a huge impact i know in california and other states we have these issues or ballot issues from charter school to other issues they can really have an impact and silence the voice and culture to become great which it is great to continue doing is doing we can at sally's. democracy and this decision salis democracy because it

lets corporations this have a free for all on all electoral process in a way i mean this tracks back to the eighty six senate floor kind of result of desperately reverse assertion in the head bowed not in the actual decision exactly the corporations are persons and then you've got you know follow on from that mary and you want to say i think if you were to look for a silver lining in citizens united and you'd have to dig very very deep but it would be that it has raised in awareness about these you know kind of money in politics issues and that our government is you know for sale to the highest bidder i mean things were a mess before citizens united and that made it one hundred times worse but you know citizens united is i mean it's been a it's become kind of a code word for you know a lot of reforms that are needed and i think you know there are something like one hundred different rallies in seventy five different cities and in towns across the country this weekend and that's just an example of how much people are willing to

get out and and show their feelings on this and it's really quite remarkable i think that americans are are talking about the range of things that this brings forward from you know the consequences of judicial review i mean. people calling my radio show wanting to talk about judicial review which i think is is crazy i think marbury vs madison was wrongly decided eighteen zero three and i just established a horrible precedent it's only constitutional but it's like i couldn't get anybody to talk about this stuff you know five years ago late and ten years ago when i wrote an equal protection the book about ultimately citizens united you know nobody nobody would have anything to do with this alexis organic consumers. do you see are you are you seeing a coalition of a larger group of people who are involved in a variety of things that are basically on the ground micronesia is coming together around this absolutely and this issue impacts us at every level of government one

of the things that our members would like to do is for instance stop a factory farm from coming into their neighborhood and following their drinking water and lowering their property values but because corporations are treated as persons under under the law if they make it to democratic decision at the local level to do that through their city council or their county government the the corporation can actually sue the city government the local government for damages if they lose money off of that decision and they've done it many many times the community environmental legal defense fund has been doing this for a decade they've been they've been helping communities mostly to stop factory farms and and the communities are passing was saying corporation isn't a person in our town. comes the big. successes though in pushing back against well i think the fact that this is the tactic that we're using now that we want as a people majority of us do not believe that corporations deserve constitutional

rights and now we're willing to use this as a tactic rather than just zoning the factory farm out of our locality we are passing laws that say we as a people deserve the right to local control and we are denying corporations personhood in our locality so so def is doing if they're challenging this idea and hopefully it will be by. every level of government and the will of the people have heard. a friend of mine jonathan freeman. is an attorney and he has a family foundation and so he took the incorporation papers for his family foundation put them in the glove box of his car and for weeks went out and sang with california for weeks one of the. in the high occupancy the h.l.v. lane you know you've got to have at least two people and because the california code the signs say you must have two persons they actually use the word persons and the california code uses the word persons and earlier in the code says for the

purpose of this code person means a person or corporation he finally got pulled over by a cop about two weeks ago pulled out the corp papers and so there's two persons in this car me and my family foundation cop would have nothing to do with it he took it to court i think it was last wednesday actually and the judge said well you're crazy yeah it's not a person it's a piece of paper and so that's great yes and jonathan is now appealing it but and he's hoping to eventually get this thing before the supreme court this is one of many kind of civil actions that i'm seeing grill a theater are you seeing more and more of this kind of thing certainly i mean all through you know i mean since since citizens united was passed i think that we have seen a lot more actions you know just common cause has done a ton more of these things in the last you know eighteen months we've been out there around the american legislative exchange council. and yeah i think people who are finally starting to get it and get angry and i mean i mentioned we mentioned alec in the debate before we played

a little clip from paul weyrich when i saw this was all of that yeah you know our leverage in the elections goes up as you noted bob it was goes down i mean this is been the republican mantra for twenty two years now and thirty two years and and what what is being done about that what how do we push back when we've got state after state that's actually passing these voter suppression you know they are the key thing that you know to voters i work for also was very unique caucus and i think that we do issues from voting rights of the right the issues and i think that what we're seeing is the connection with alec for instance trying to roll back all these rights will try to cripple rights regarding voting voter rights and bringing forth ideas regarding voter i.d.'s but even further than that we're seeing things that are trying to. enfranchise experiments to try to keep their voice from ever being heard and that really hurts democracy as well but even further was seeing issues were gone the prison industrial complex and other aspects really using their

money to really create this democracy for sale mantua and i think that's where it becomes a problem when you have private prisons lobbying for three strikes and you're out yes no this becomes a huge problem and i just want to say that you know for me you know i love my country i mean i was i was an ex air force officer. and so i understand the import of democracy and also that as african-american knowing how far we've come as a country and now it's never get to the point where president obama's being. again this is awesome but to know that he is being rolled back to know that corporations are making us say what would have happened if to be honest if the if the slave owners could have influenced how that could have been said what would happen if the wall works would be able to push forward say you know what we would prefer legislation that would keep the lunch counter for segregated. when we come back we'll pick up this conversation i'd like to talk about the nixon and kennedy debates. and it's bigger picture discussion politics money and voter money our

voters in coming up after the break. we're going. to. let me let me i want to know why not let me ask you a question. here on this network is what we have in the bank we have our knives out. in the sky it's a bad thing there's again we're in

a situation where being i don't even talk about surveillance. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so. you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else. and realized everything. is a big picture. another reason day of the much more than a taking a closer look at president obama's second term even. more invasions of privacy. for the president only on a. lot

of magazines bigger picture discussion politics money out voters and joining me tonight are robin one of your wood president c.e.o. of hip hop caucus mary boyle a vice president communications common cause alexis baden their political director of the organic consumers association i mention before the break one hundred sixty kennedy nixon debates they were asked what would you do about the problem of lunch counters in the south nixon said he would bring together the business people and ask them to be nice kennedy said he'd basically kick them upside the head with a law and and we're still having that debate we're still having that debate in america about whether government should be you know participating in making sure that there's actually democracy that's right this is why this legislation this law is so so bad and i think that's

a great point. in the mix and debates because it shows a difference in opinion of how things could be done if we had listened to nixon. was segregated today. mary what do. looking that the short term and long term are some grounds you were there there are a number of things that can be done in the short medium and long term to address citizens united i mean one is you know in congress and state legislatures we need to improve transparency around giving so we know who's giving a lot of this money you know we may never know where it came from mid-term you mentioned a constitutional amendment before that's something that we're working on a number of states have overwhelmingly approved ballot measures urging congress to pass a constitutional amendment. and in the long term we need to pass that constitutional amendment which which is a long journey but you know there is a lot of momentum being built right now around that that's great and alexis what beyond just talking about citizens united i mean we're talking largely about that

but. i remember during the clinton ministration i don't remember what the rule was or the change but there was this big thing about hard money and soft money and all this kind of stuff there are a lot of things that congress can do is sort of overturning citizens united through a constitutional amendment which is a decades long process that began today how about the american add to the corruption act you know for my issue i would love it if monsanto couldn't bribe members of the agriculture committee so that they could get subsidies for factory farms and genetically modified food i'd like to see public financing i'd like to to see congress step up and do the things sort of overturning citizens united today i mean our campaign finance system is broken and we need to take it out of the hands of a very few very wealthy people and put it back into the hands of us actually passed out of the house when nancy pelosi was running it and died in the senate because of a filibuster so it were the word problem that we have where we go with this forever and then we had to keep pushing forward i just want to cite. it is it with.

reference to the no keystone x.l. pipeline. that's the issue that has caused it right now and i miss that because we're big all. the kind of money coming in at this pipeline is built fast as it will have disastrous effects not me all of those communities but our climate and our country and our world and so these issues about money and politics can affect everything even life for our communities life on earth i mean as if we could be looking at the top of the permian extinction you know you visit here it's that serious it is very much is the thank you all for being here thank you thank you. to see this bigger picture discussion again or any of our conversations the great minds go to our website conversations great minds stuck.

out of the bowels of the internet we find an endless stream of misattributed quotes and made up stories that end up in chain emails that eventually receive from your loopy uncle in texas who's trying to justify right wing economics or anti obama conspiracy theories is just one of the headaches of the internet age but there's one quote in particular that's always attributed to an obscure scottish historian sir alexander frazier tytler as if that gave a great credibility or that he was scottish or something and it seems to both make sense and prophesied the end of the american public title or was supposed to have said quote a democracy cannot exist as a pawn permanent form of government it can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves large jets from the public treasury from that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the

public treasury with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy always followed by a dictatorship tyler goes on to talk about the process or at least this attribution to him by which the. democracies fail is the result of this supposedly voter selfishness he says the average age of the world's greatest civilization has been two hundred years he was rumored to have said these nations have progressed through this sequence from bondage to spiritual faith from spiritual faith the great courage great courage to liberty from liberty to abundance from abundance of selfishness selfishness to complacency to complacency to apathy apathy to dependency dependency back to bondage now here's the reality. tyler never said any of those words they could all be tracked back to right wing american businessmen in the early decades of the twentieth century and why would a right wing businessman be saying such things because in actual point of fact the

thing that corrupts democracies is not the voters demanding free stuff to paraphrase mitt romney but instead it's business men and women buying off politicians it's not the powerless who corrupt democracies as that viral right wing quote would suggest it's the powerful who corrupt democracies and money is the source of that power yes over the last hundred years average american people have voted themselves benefits like social security on employment insurance medicare medicaid or at least they have voted for representatives who would put that into place but at the same time the american people have also supported tax increases on themselves to pay for all those things. remember the social security tax only applies to the first one hundred thirteen thousand dollars in wages earned income people like paris hilton and mitt romney when they get all their money from capital gains dividends carried interest in a penny

a social security taxes on millions of dollars in income the average top c.e.o. in america with an income of thirteen point seven million dollars a year over a million dollars a month can you imagine a quarter million dollars a week showing up in a checking account they hope to pay social security taxes on the first few days of income every year after that every penny they take is social security tax free because the only pay it on the first hundred thirteenth or first hundred thirteen thousand dollars quite literally as leona helmsley famously said only the little people pay such taxes the safety net program for working class people is exclusively paid for by working class people on the other hand when the billionaire class extracts benefits from the government for themselves they generally don't pay higher taxes taif as

a lot of the warren pointed out she said you know people wonder is there is the system reg yes it is she's right the billionaires exceed the billions in taxpayer subsidies for big oil the trillions and bailouts and bonuses for wall street banks toure's the hundreds of billions for war profiteers they're always accompanied by those people offer to pay more in taxes but instead by demands for more tax cuts at the top stimulate the economy cut the billionaires taxes. and truth be told billionaires aren't even receiving these benefits by voting for them instead they get them through the simple process of buying politicians for example sheldon adelson spent one hundred fifty million dollars in the last election that's more than any american has spent in any election in american history at least that we know of and he spent all that money to give himself the benefits of derailing an

obama justice department investigation into his casino in china and get his taxes cut even further billionaires also corrupt democracy through their benefits to get their benefits through billionaire funded think tanks like the koch funded american legislative exchange council of rights legislation actually sit down lobbyists and republican legislators sit together in a room to write legislation that will benefit corporate america and then alec has the republican state lawmakers take it back to their state houses and pass those laws in state after state after state from the page. but despite this very clear reality of who is demanding large us from our government it's still working people and average voters who are targeted by right wingers with their viral e-mails as the selfish takers they're the ones who are going to vote themselves all that social security. that's the reason why the business roundtable is saying the best way to fix insurance programs like social security and medicare is to raise the

retirement age to seventy in voucher eyes medicare frankly i think part of the reason why the top two hundred c.e.o.'s in america are saying that could be that their pensions their french and programs are underfunded and this where they won't have to pay it out the average c.e.o. for an s. and p. five hundred company doesn't need social security but they know that by raising the retirement age they're shielding themselves from any tax increases that may come with raising that payroll tax cap so if we were to say hey it's not just the first hundred thirteen thousand even billionaires have to pay into social security and suddenly they're paying taxes and quickly and easily that would make social security solvent forever billionaires would be pay in taxes america's fiscal programs have nothing to do with voters in fact the billionaire class is trying to make it harder and harder for people to vote by pushing for voter suppression idea laws and restrictions on early voting america's fiscal problems are

a direct result of the billionaire class working behind the scenes of our democracy and siphoning off massive amounts of wealth for themselves by paying lower taxes than they've paid and a half century as senator bernie sanders pointed out a quarter of all profitable corporations in america paid zero federal taxes and mitt romney and paris hilton's income tax cut rates top out of twenty percent tyler didn't really say those words of the billionaire class think tanks and email shills attribute to them but had he said that then he probably would have said something more along the lines of this a democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government it can only exist until the billionaires discover that they can steal for themselves large debts from the public treasury to buy and politicians from that time on the billionaires will always buy candidates promising them the most benefits in the public treasury with the result that a democracy always. over loose fiscal policy always followed by a dictatorship if we are concerned about the future of our american democratic

republic the way to preserve it is not to protect it isn't not to protect it from greedy social security recipients by pushing the retirement age back to seventy it's to get money out of government thus neutering the political power of the billionaire class and that means reversing to core doctrines that the u.s. supreme court literally created out of thin air at the request by the way of big business and billionaires that corporations are people and that money is speech the best way to reverse those two is through a constitutional amendment that says no corporations are not people and no money is not speech for more information and to join the movement for the move to amend or for the survival of our democratic republic. and that's the way it is tonight friday january eighteenth twenty thirteen. for more information check out our website thom hartmann dot com free speech or two dot com at hulu dot com slash picture and don't forget democracy begins with you get out there get active tag

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